Perhaps President Barack Obama should
give himself a waiver on the ban prohibiting U.S. government employees
from downloading classified cables released by WikiLeaks, so he can
get a better grasp on the futility of his Afghan War strategy.

For instance, if Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton has hidden from him Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s cables
from Kabul, he might wish to search out KABUL 001892 of July 13, 2009,
in which Eikenberry reports that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is “unable
to grasp the most rudimentary principles of state building.”

And, while he’s at it, he should
dig out the September 2009 cable from the U.S. Ambassador in Pakistan,
Anne Patterson, in which she warns: “There is no chance that Pakistan
will view enhanced assistance … as sufficient compensation for abandoning
support to these [Taliban and similar] groups in Pakistan.”

The same conclusion is contained in
the recent National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
My advice to Obama would be: Don’t let anyone gist them for you; read
at least the Key Judgments.

In his recent
defense of his Afghanistan-Pakistan
policy, Obama acted as if he didn’t know or understand the full import
of these disclosures. Instead, he simply reiterated the “three areas
of our strategy” in Afghanistan:

“To break the Taliban’s momentum
and train Afghan forces so they can take the lead; to promote effective
governance and development; and regional cooperation, especially with
Pakistan, because our strategy has to succeed on both sides of the border.”

But, Mr. President, you should know
that the Taliban’s momentum has not been broken; nor is it likely
to be. And good luck with President Karzai on that “effective governance”
thing, not to mention the part about getting cooperation from Pakistan.
Indeed, the real Achilles heel of Obama’s strategy, the true showstopper,
is the forlorn hope of stronger cooperation from Pakistan.

Other WikiLeaks cables make Pakistan’s
deep concern about the encroachment of India in Afghanistan unmistakably
clear. In one cable, for example, Pakistani Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani
is reported to have been “utterly frank” about the consequences
of a pro-India government coming to power in Kabul, saying:

“The Pakistani establishment will
dramatically increase support for Taliban groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan
… as an important counterweight.”

The Great Game

So, here’s the important point to
understand: While U.S. presidents and European leaders have long viewed
Afghanistan as a strategic square on the global chessboard – from
the British imperial Great Game to the U.S.-Soviet Cold War to today’s
“war on terror” – Pakistan sees its Afghan neighbor in the context
of Pakistan’s fierce regional rivalry with India.

Indeed, Pakistan’s powerful intelligence
service, the ISI, created the Taliban in the 1990s by recruiting Afghan
refugees in Pakistan and building them into a force to drive out an
Afghan mujahedin regime in Kabul that Pakistan regarded as having overly
close ties to India.

So, Mr. President, with respect to
your third “area of strategy” – getting Pakistan to “cooperate” – you may wish to be more careful in making claims like: “Along
with our Afghan partners, we’ve gone on the offensive, targeting the
Taliban and its leaders and pushing them out of their strongholds.”

Thanks for listening.

What the President Obama doesn’t
tell us is where those pushed-out Taliban go, but we know, don’t we?
They go across the border and are given refuge by the same Pakistanis
who continue to keep them supplied, trained and armed – as is abundantly
clear in several of the ground-truth U.S. Army messages in the “Afghanistan
War Logs” made available by WikiLeaks.

Has no one told the President that
Pakistan’s ace-in-the-hole against encroachment by arch-rival India
into Afghanistan is none other than the Taliban?

And, as Ambassador Patterson has emphasized,
Islamabad is not about to risk losing that high card even in the unlikely
event that Washington should threaten to curtail military assistance
to Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan has other cards to play.

What most Americans forget regarding
Afghanistan is that you can’t get there from here. Some 80 percent
of U.S. war materiel must traverse Pakistan.

Gen. Kayani has already demonstrated
what he is willing to do when he feels Pakistani sensibilities are not
taken seriously by the U.S. – like blocking supply convoys and letting
them be torched by “militants.” In short, the Pakistanis are well
aware that the U.S. needs them at least as much as they need the U.S.

Understandably, Pakistan’s leaders
are pleased to take their sizable share of U.S. taxpayer money, but
among the painful lessons learned in Washington is that this does not
translate into influence – and especially not in regard to Pakistani
strategic priorities and objectives.

Wooing a General

In Obama’s Dec. 16 speech outlining
the findings of his cursory Afghan War review, the President insisted
that “we are seeing significant progress” in the goal of “disrupting,
dismantling and defeating” al-Qaeda, but he complained that Pakistan’s
progress in rooting out terrorists “has not come fast enough.”

“So,” he added, “we will continue
to insist to Pakistani leaders that terrorist safe havens within their
borders must be dealt with.” But Pakistani leaders have wearied of
Washington’s imperious tone and have become inured to this kind of
empty rhetoric. They brush it aside and laugh all the way to the bank.

The Washington Post started
the New Year with a
front-page article offering
more evidence about the U.S. dilemma, a piece by Karin Brulliard and
Karen DeYoung, entitled “U.S. courts Pakistan’s top general, with
little result.”

The title should have been “U.S.
cannot harness Pakistan behind Afghan effort: Defeat Inevitable.”

Still, the Brulliard/DeYoung report
highlights the fact that Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mullen has been
assigned the task of bringing Kayani around to Washington’s way of
thinking. Their story notes that Mullen has had “more than 30 face-to-face
meetings with Kayani, including 21 visits to Pakistan since late 2007.”

Two weeks ago, during his most recent
visit to Pakistan, Mullen said it was “very possible” that Pakistan
would be able to root out insurgents from havens inside its territory
that serve as a launching point for lethal strikes in Afghanistan. Possible
perhaps, but don’t hold your breath.

Mullen has spoken of the “criticality
of Pakistan in terms of overall success” in Afghanistan. The authors
say, however, that both men believe there is a “trust deficit between
the two militaries.”

But it’s not really a “trust deficit,”
as we’ve seen. It is a strategic difference – a clash of interests
– that cannot be bridged.

A Simple Syllogism

In effect, Brulliard and DeYoung set
up a simple syllogism, but avoided the politically incorrect conclusion,
however compelling:

–Major premise: “What the Obama
administration’s recent strategy review concluded is a key to success
in the Afghan war [is] the elimination of havens inside Pakistan where
the Taliban plots and stages attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan.”

–Minor premise: “Pakistani army
chief Kayani, who as Pakistan’s army chief has more direct say over
the country’s security strategy than its president or prime minister,
has resisted personal appeals from President Obama…is unlikely to
change his mind anytime soon…and is hedging his bets in case the American
strategy for Afghanistan fails.”

–Conclusion: If the U.S. must get
Pakistan’s help in eliminating the Taliban’s safe havens to and
if that cooperation won’t be forthcoming from Pakistan, the prospects
of U.S. “success” are close to zero.

Yet, however obvious this conclusion
may be, it goes begging in the arch-Establishment Washington Post.

What really rubs across the grain is the apparent
naïveté that reigns among policy makers in Washington
– reflected in the oft-expressed hope by Secretary Clinton, Mullen and
others that the U.S. can somehow change the strategic vision of
Pakistan with a mix of flattery, threats, money and gifts (usually in
the form of sophisticated military hardware).

It was particularly painful to hear
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Michele Flournoy, tell a rapt
audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School several weeks ago that she expects
the Pakistanis to come around, once we are able to “shift their strategic
calculus.”

But Kayani and his colleagues are not
naïve. The Washington Post
article quotes Kayani as complaining that he is “always asking [Gen.
David] Petraeus what is the strategic objective in Afghanistan.” As
well he might.

I suppose, though, it doesn’t much
matter whether or not the likes of Flournoy, Mullen and Clinton really
believe they can get more help from the Pakistanis.

My guess is that – given the U.S.’s
actual strategic vision as opposed to its stated objectives – senior
U.S. policy makers feel stuck in Afghanistan and may realize by now
that it is a forlorn hope that they can buy more cooperation from Islamabad,
no matter how much money or weaponry they bring to the table.

As Kayani and the Pakistanis are well
aware, the actual U.S. objectives have much more to do with the traditional
Western interests in the region – strategic geography and natural
resources combined with more recent worries over what might happen with
Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

The Pakistani nukes are, in fact, the
baleful byproduct of a myopic, Cold-War-conditioned U.S. obsession with
Afghanistan in the 1980s. President Ronald Reagan wanted to checkmate
the Soviet Union by arming Islamic fundamentalists, both Afghan and
Arabs, to battle Soviet troops that had been sent in by Moscow to protect
a secular leftist regime in Kabul.

Part of the price for securing Pakistan’s
cooperation was Washington’s willingness to look the other way while
Pakistan circumvented non-proliferation protocols to secretly build
a nuclear arsenal. [For details, see ConsortiumNews.com’s “Reagan’s Bargain/Charlie
Wilson’s War.”]

A Long-Term Approach

Given the variety of U.S. strategic
interests in Central Asia, today’s bedrock American policy appears
to be the creation of an enduring U.S. presence in Afghanistan. That’s
right; think longer term than even 2014.

The Post’s Walter Pincus reported
on Dec. 21 that Bagram airfield in Afghanistan continues to grow. In
mid-December, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put out a “pre-solicitation
notice” for a contractor to build the eighth of nine planned increments
for troop housing at Bagram “to replace expeditionary housing facilities.”
Pincus adds that 18 months ago there were already 20,000 American military
and civilian personnel housed there.

In 2008, the Army explained the need
for supplemental funding for an ammunition storage facility at Bagram,
where 12 “igloos” were planned to support Army and Air Force needs.
The Army wrote, “As a forward operating site, Bagram must be able
to provide for a long-term, steady state presence which is able to surge
to meet theater contingency requirements.” Read: The U.S. military
is in Afghanistan for the long haul.

A year earlier, CENTCOM commander Adm.
William Fallon, in testimony to Congress, described Bagram as “the
centerpiece for the CENTCOM Master Plan for future access to and operations
in Central Asia.”

Strategically situated as it is, Afghanistan
is not only a key chessboard square from which to hunt down the few
hundred surviving al-Qaeda operatives in the border area with Pakistan.
Nor is it simply to be positioned to launch some future emergency mission
to secure Pakistan’s nukes if Islamic extremists take over.
Afghanistan also happens to sit next to huge reserves of natural gas
and oil.

Are we getting the picture? The Great
Game has simply found new trappings with a rationale more attuned to
the Western political realities (and sensibilities) of today – and
with a fresher title.

We now have the “Long War,” which
has many similarities to the old Great Game. It is still a competition
for the region’s resources and strategic bases, albeit with the United
States and China joining the ranks of outside powers now elbowing for
position.

The Grim Ground View

On Dec. 27 another Washington Postfront-page article by Greg Jaffe highlighted how the misadventure
in Afghanistan looks to the oft-praised but more often forgotten forces
on the ground:

“Earlier this year, Lt. Col. Joseph
Ryan concluded that his 800-soldier battalion was locked in an endless
war for an irrelevant valley.

“’There is nothing strategically
important about this terrain,’ said Ryan, 41, a blunt commander who
has spent much of the past decade in combat. ‘We fight here because
the enemy is here. The enemy fights here because we are here.’

“Ryan’s challenge for the past
several months has been to figure out a way to leave the Pech Valley … without
handing the insurgents a victory.…”

“Pech” means bad luck in German – and maybe not only in German. The word seems to speak to the reality
that the Lt. Col. Ryans and grunts of this world take the casualties
while the Clintons, Mullens, and Flournoys of Washington plot high strategy,
including packaging the costly conflict as necessary to protect the
fearful American people from terrorism.

However, the documents released by
WikiLeaks and the recent analysis by the U.S. intelligence community
combine to make it clear that the stated objectives of the U.S. either
are unachievable or are facades for other unstated goals.

It is not rocket science. Not only
the WikiLeaks documents and U.S. intelligence analyses, but simple logic
gives the lie to Obama’s recent claim, after his perfunctory Afghanistan-Pakistan
policy review, that “we are on track to achieve our goals.”

Is President Obama impervious to documentary
evidence, intelligence analysis and logic? That beggars belief. So why
does the President insist on continuing the March of Folly begun by
his predecessor?

WANTED: A Cogent Answer

We owe it to those being killed and
maimed every day to demand a cogent answer to this question. The alternative
is to revert to the ethos of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,”
a classic poem commemorating a battle between British and Russian forces
in the Crimean War in 1854, during the Great Game era:

“‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die,
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.”

Update: Into the Hindu Kush rode the 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops.

It is essential that we resist the
administration’s attempts to infantilize and seduce us by the comfort
of soothing illusion.

President Obama’s brief address on Dec. 16 about achieving “core goals”
in Afghanistan was riddled with a Swiss-cheese patchwork of holes –
a case study in non-sequiturs and empty phrases suitable for a Rhetoric
101 class on specious logic.

If the White House PR people still
think that the sonorous alliterations out of a Dr. Seuss stylebook –“disrupt,
dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda”– will suffice to ensure the support
of the American people, they have another think coming.

But the President’s form-over-substance
speechwriters keep at it nonetheless, adding some “r” alliterations
to the earlier “d” sounds. In his speech, Obama said al-Qaeda “remains
a ruthless and resilient enemy bent on attacking our country. But make
no mistake – we are going to remain relentless in disrupting and dismantling
that terrorist organization.”

Does this mean that with the 140,000
NATO troops now in Afghanistan, we’ve been able to kill or capture
some of the 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives who CIA Director Leon Panetta
has said may still be in Afghanistan and maybe some of the few hundred
hiding on the other side of the border with Pakistan?

The Taliban Tangent

Alas, we are left to figure out that
answer for ourselves, as Obama went off on a familiar tangent, equating
al-Qaeda with the Taliban. (BULLETIN: For those who only think inside
the Fox box, please know that the two are not the same.)

This bloody adventure in Afghanistan
is made all the easier to continue by the reality that is not “we”
who are condemned “but to do and die,” but mostly disadvantaged
folks from our small towns and inner cities whom we privileged Americans
are happy to let do the dying for the rest of us.

Is it that Americans no longer care
about this sort of thing? Are we so dumbed down as not to be able to
see that there is no justifiable logic behind the killing, maiming and
destruction, even assuming the professed goals in Afghanistan are the
real ones – a dubious assumption indeed.

Facades of Empire

Washington’s present course in Central
Asia can be much more logically understood if the real goals of the
violence are to achieve what an empire requires in terms of military
bases, natural resources, strategic interests and further enrichment
of the super-wealthy.

This is to explain, not to defend. And,
in case you’re wondering, my view is that these goals are both morally
indefensible and unachievable in the longer run.

Combine them, however, with back-home
political interests – Democrats fearful of being called out by Republicans
and the Right as weak on defense and soft on terror – and you have
a better sense of why the Afghan War drags on.

Americans have been generally inclined
to give the government and its official explanation for war the benefit
of the doubt – but only for so long. Many are now coming around to
the realization they’ve been had.

According to a CNN/Opinion Research
Corporation survey of Americans conducted from Dec. 17 to 19 (immediately
after Obama’s public reassurances), 63 percent of the respondents
expressed opposition to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan – an all-time
high.

For those who think Afghan opinion
also matters, recent polling conducted by the BBC, ABC, and other news
organizations shows that, in provinces where there is the most fighting,
the proportion of people approving of attacks on U.S. troops has risen
from 12 to 40 percent in the last year.

Since Gen. Petraeus loves metrics for
gauging the progress of his counterinsurgency strategies, he might want
to put those numbers into one of his PowerPoint displays about his success
at winning hearts and minds.

As Harry Truman was fond of saying,
most of us were “not born yesterday.” Those able to think outside
the Fox box can discern when artificial alliteration and dubious logic
masquerade as articulation of sound policy.

Congressional Hearings?

It may take a couple of run-throughs
of this background, but Americans are inclined to “dis” (to use
inner-city vernacular) artifices like “disrupt, dismantle, defeat”
as empty slogans hiding a lamentable lack of cogent thinking.

I find myself asking, a la John Kerry
before he let the imperial Establishment do a lobotomy cutting the connection
to the Vietnam file in his brain, “How do you ask a man to be the
last man to die for a mistake?”

Maybe it is too much to expect today’s
John Kerry to do better than his timorous predecessor as chair of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Vice President Joe Biden.

In the run-up to President George W.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Biden caved in to strong White House pressure
and staged faux hearings featuring the kind of “experts” who predicted
that an invasion of WMD-laden Iraq would be a “cakewalk,” and shunning
those of us predicting catastrophe.

Et tu, John? One can always pray for
miracles, but the current Foreign Relations Committee chairman appears
to be the same empty shirt who let himself be persuaded by his handlers
in the 1990s that his dreams for political advancement required making
peace with the Establishment.

Sadly, it’s almost impossible to
envision Kerry converting back to the more courageous politician of
his early days in the U.S. Senate when he challenged the Reagan administration’s
foreign policy, let alone to the gutsy young Navy officer who in 1971
confronted the same committee he now chairs.

201203360012 Responseshttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2Fmcgovern%2F2011%2F01%2F03%2Fobama-should-read-wikileaks-on-afghanistan%2FObama+Should+Read+WikiLeaks+on+Afghanistan2011-01-04+06%3A00%3A05Ray+McGovernhttp%3A%2F%2Foriginal.antiwar.com%2F%3Fp%3D2012033600 to “Obama Should Read WikiLeaks on Afghanistan”

The daily USG/MIC, Mafia-Industrial-Complex, proclamations about progress being made, the TaliQueda are on the run, all take on a "1984" quality about the wars in the "1984" Eurasia. The USG/MIC wars needs a new title, MusAisia, Muslim Asia and the daily proclamations needs to address all the success of the wars in MusAsia.

The height of the Kafkaesque Situation has been Big Sister Neapolitano's visit to Kabul, where she apparently promised to help stop the flow of "bomb-making chemical" (what?) across the Af/Pak border. Does anyone else in this government believe that a whole country full of people straight out of Italowestern movies can be secured like a US-american inner city airport?

Interesting article. But as usual in these analyses the Empire's intent of encircling China is given relatively little attention. China is the only serious economic challenge to the US right now. The challenge is economic but the Empire's response is military. That is a recipe for a win-lose or even a lose-lose strategy – the opposite of the win-win course that the Chinese are seeking. Of course continued military threats from the Empire carry the tragic threat that China may be driven off that course.
jw

I am very impressed by Ray McGovern and his tireless work on behalf of his country and it's people..
There are so many competing interests……but, we must remember that it was president Cheney who invaded Afghanistan… in the 911 putsch…

Sorry to post this as it MAY be off topic, but is SURE is on some peoples minds this morning:

Did a central controller with “super user” privileges of the command and control systems of the Department of Defense, NORAD, the Air Force, and the FAA, control the aerial attacks of 9/11? There is only one agency that has that capability â€“ a little-known private company known as MITRE Corp.

There are basically two versions of events surrounding the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. There is the government version, propagated by the controlled media, which claims that 19 Arab terrorists, organized by Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, hijacked 4 passenger aircraft and used them to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This version, used to launch the “war on terror” and two invasions in the Middle East, is challenged by a lack of evidence.

On the other hand, a host of unofficial explanations, based on available evidence, make up what can be called the “inside job” or anti-government version. This version basically claims that agents embedded within the U.S. military and intelligence organizations conspired to carry out the terror attacks.

Great analysis by Ray McGovern. He is right on with citing India's nefarious role and Pakistan's predictable response in the imbroglio.
Some years ago, an Afghan academician attempted to translate my book "Afghanistan, Ending the Reign of Soviet Terror" into Pashto while residing in India. He was placed under surveillance, threatened, abused and imprisoned by the Indian (RAW) intelligence service for translating a book highly critical of the Northern Alliance who served and serve as Soviet/Russian and Indian collaborators in Afghanistan.

Obomber is too busy reading Reagan's memoirs. Apparently, he doesn't think he's a good enough Republican yet so he's picking up tips from the book. In his free time, he orders more drone attacks on civilians. You know, that winning their hearts and minds…and rest of the body by whatever the means is working wonders for him.

The Empire should have thought about the consequences of its actions before it decided to give China most-favored-nation status, membership in WTO and GATT and before it decided to offer tax incentives to "American" businesses that locate their manufacturing overseas.

Is it any suprise so many once patriotic, loyal Americans now speak what had formally been branded as sedition?

Obama is not in charge. In Rome during their wars they appointed a pro consul in charge of the war and an ordinary consul in charge of the 'domestic' issues. Obama has little input with regards to 'exterior' policies, he is President of the 'interior' or Homeland if you like that term.

I should have mentioned that the above post was about John P Wheeler III whose body was found just after it was DUMPED in the Cherry Point Landfill in Deleware…. He was NOT just anybody or the sort of person one would expect to spend eternity in a landfill… He was an adviser to the last three Republican presidents….& had a top secret clearance…. Sorry to have posted the above wierdness,,, I guess I am always trying to find SOME CLUE that will explain this or that bit of the CRAZY situation I, we…Americas finds ourselves in: The rule of law seriously subverted, and two wars being run on borrowed money….as the country goes down, down, down….!!! I won't go on any more and I would delete most of the comment IF I could, but now that it has been thumbs upped (2) I cannot…

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. In the Sixties he served as an infantry/intelligence officer and then became a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).